Creator of Yoon-Suin and other materials. Propounding my half-baked ideas on role playing games. Jotting down and elaborating on ideas for campaigns, missions and adventures. Talking about general industry-related matters. Putting a new twist on gaming.

Wednesday, 6 June 2018

Report from the Field

I recently had a (successful, thanks for asking) job interview at one of the UK's best universities (top 10 on all the ranking lists I'm aware of - that should help you stalkers out there narrow me down somewhat). While there, I took the opportunity to browse through their campus bookshop. Sure enough, nestled among all the textbooks on endocrinology and financial risk management; the medieval French literature and obscure theological tomes; the experimental postmodern novels and historical treatises on trade unions in Uruguay in the 1870-1890 period; etc., I found an entire bookcase - not a shelf, a bookcase - of 5th edition D&D books.

There can only be one conclusion, which I arrive at hastily and without any sort of empirical evidence beyond this anecdote: D&D is getting popular again.

Not hugely popular, I think. I doubt we'll get back to heady days of the 1980s and 1990s when British bookshops and even music shops used to have entire, vast sections of RPG rulebooks and supplements for spotty teenaged boys to browse. But things are happening for 5th edition in a way that I don't think they happened for editions 3 and 4. Whisper it, but D&D is almost in the cultural zeitgeist - for all my loathing of geek culture and all it entails, there is no denying its power and momentum.

A point of comparison: when I left home to go to university myself, back in 1999, I had already "grown out" of RPGs a few years earlier and wouldn't have dreamed of getting involved in them during my time as a student. (I returned to the fold in the mid-late 2000s.) The idea of RPG books being available in campus bookshops... it would have been unthinkable. The kind of student who exists nowadays - the self-identifying geek with the fashionably naff glasses, the t-shirt with its ironic and unfunny slogan, the so-not-chic-they're-chic Doc Martens, etc., you know the sort - simply didn't exist. There were plenty of nerds, but they either hid it more or less successfully (my attempted strategy) or were so utterly socially isolated, so far beyond the periphery of polite society that they were figuratively and might as well literally have been kobolds, that it didn't matter.

Now you can not only buy D&D books in prestigious universities that very posh people go to. You can (I assume) buy them without shame and even, possibly, in a way, you can even do it and be considered cool.

"You can (I assume) buy them without shame and even, possibly, in a way, you can even do it and be considered cool."

Well now, let's not get carried away. I mean, if you're already extremely cool to begin with perhaps you can pull off buying D&D books without suffering any substantial loss of status, but I'm going to need a lot of convincing before I believe that anyone's status could be elevated by such a purchase.

Congratulations. I have been reading your blog for years and have encapsulated your mind in a little puddle. I am pleasantly surprised to find your estimation of yourself vindicated by a panel of expert interviewers from a London university. Only a churlish gamer from middle america would consider your exciting broadcast as a humble, or diverting, brag. The rest of us are cheering in thug-laden streets at midnght,

Ok, I left for Uni in '90. Vampire: the Masquerade was on the verge of being released and it hit like a storm. But even before then, things were different in Texas. There was a large (though maybe not compared to the size of the student body) gaming club that basically met once a semester to allow all us nerds to find each other and organize regular games, whether that was wargaming or RPGs or whatever (and, eventually, lots of Magic: the Gathering. It wasn't odd to see folks gathered around one of 2e's PHB in the cafeteria, planning a new campaign, and once I let it be known that I was running a game, I had no problem at all filling up my group (with two other guys and four gals).

If there was a stigma to playing the game, I sure didn't encounter it. No, I don't remember the books being available at the student bookstores, but who cared? There was a really good used bookstore that had a big shelf of gaming stuff, plus two really good comic and gaming stores within walking distance.

Of course, this was also during one on of the big boom times for comics, destroyed when they started trying to cater to collectors more than readers. And when V:tM did hit, suddenly the scene was full of goth chicks not just rolling dice but LARPing!

Almost certainly. Somehow, I ended up in a little bubble that was hardly touched by the hate towards D&D. I had no trouble finding (most) books or copies of DRAGON magazine, either in small local shops or large chain stores (though I was saddened when the RPG stuff was eventually put behind glass or in locked cabinets). Nobody ever accosted me about playing. The religious school I attended for junior high actively encouraged our playing. I never got any flack for playing in high school or college. It's possible I lived in a happy bubble. It's possible I was socially oblivious.

One factor in this is surely the hegemony that D&D enjoys in the RPG scene, which must be at its greatest extent since the 1970s. When I got into gaming in primary school in the 1980s, D&D was often seen as a sort of backward country cousin, chewing a straw and strumming a banjo in its scuffed overalls as your RuneQuests and GURPSes and Call of Cthulhus showed off their sophistication. And then there were Dragon Warriors and WHFRP, which had less muddled mechanics than D&D and far more accessible and atmospheric settings. In the 90s, the solitary, clandestine trip a friend and I made to the university's RPG society resulted in a game of Call of Cthulhu. I don't recall D&D even being on offer then, with Chaosium and GURPS dominating.

Games Workshop was probably a major factor in that. When it still supported non-GW games, White Dwarf was infinitely more interesting than Dragon magazine, and far better illustrated. And the US RPGs that were made over by GW (Runequest, Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, etc) looked much sexier than AD&D. The original Monster Manual has aged very well, but it looked pretty quaint back then.

These days, though, D&D clearly dominates the market. It's recovered its status as a hoover/kleenex-style metonym. And I think that makes it easier for more mainstream stores (including temples of other sorts of nerdery, like Forbidden Planet) to stock it.

No, definitely not! But my point is that D&D's reassertion of dominance makes it easier for *any* kind of non-gaming shop to stock it.

I think there are two things happening. One, RPGs are becoming more acceptable/mainstream. And two, D&D has become the overwhelmingly dominant RPG in a way in which it really wasn't for much of its history.

A consequence of the second point is that it become easier for shops that aren't dedicated games outlets to stock RPGs, because there's a clear choice. If you stock D&D these days, you're likely to sell it without having to contend with people asking for Mythras or Tunnels and Trolls. That's a far cry from the 80s, when there was a widely acknowledged "big three" of D&D, RuneQuest and Traveller, plus Rolemaster, MERP, GURPs, etc. And I'm sure the rise of the PDF market has taken a lot of the physical competition away from D&D too.

The first point, though, must owe a fair bit to computer games and, equally, a fair bit to the desire to get away from screens. The percentage of people who know what an orc must be far higher now than at any time since Tolkien introduced the word to modern English (not that the popular depiction is anything like his ...). And as more people play or have played computer games that involve killing orcs (or aliens, or whatever), the pen-and-paper equivalents have got to seem less peculiar as a result.

The mainstreaming of boardgames must be playing a part too. Most branches of Waterstones and Blackwell's have a sizeable boardgames section, and there's often an RPG tinge to that too (the D&D starter box, usually). My local branch of Blackwell's also stocks all the Osprey tabletop wargames (Frostgrave, Of Gods and Mortals, etc).

As Blackwell's is primarily an academic bookshop, another angle on this might be that the mainstreaming of boardgames (with RPG passengers) in regular bookshops has changed the notion of what an academic bookshop - and thus a campus bookshop - should stock.

But the big question, surely, is how students can afford to spend £30 on the Monster Manual! If that's now commonplace, times really have changed ...

A combination of whopping overdrafts and "loans" from the bank of mum and dad, I think. More students live at home nowadays too, I reckon - a £12,000 student loan goes a long way when you're not paying rent.